March 30, 2015

Tomas Tranströmer, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature not quite four years ago, died last Friday, aged 83. When the announcement of the Prize was made, I had never read a poem by him. But what a name! Did we have a book of his poems? We did! A 30-year-old Selected Poemswas squirrelled away in the good old Central City Library basement. Oh no, actually, not squirrelled away any longer: four quicker-on-the-draw readers had formed a queue within hours of the announcement.

So I turned to the newer publications which Auckland Libraries had quickly ordered au complet, and chose The great enigma: new collected poemsfrom 2006. The fact that the diacritical marks weren't showing correctly on the catalogue, so that the name Tranströmer appeared as Transtr?mer is not the only reason I chose it, but it certainly cinched the deal. How could I resist someone described thus:

"Transtr?mer's dominant moods are almost warily inward-turning..."

As well as being a great poet (as I discovered for myself when the book arrived, and you will discover if you keep reading), Tomas Tranströmer was also a noted entomologist, a beetle collector. There is even a beetle named for him, in an 80th birthday tribute. The “Tranströmers tornbagge” was discovered on the island of Gotland, in the Baltic Sea, where Tranströmer spent his summers as a boy. You can't help getting a whiff of Nabokov. The image in my mind's eye, in fact, is a Nabokov who never left a St Petersburg which never stopped being St Petersburg, as Max von Sydow would interpret him in an Ingmar Bergman film.

The Great Enigma includes a wonderful piece of autobiographical prose called Memories Look at Me, in which Tranströmer recalls (as well as his early visits to the library) his love of beetle-collecting:

"I moved in the great mystery. I learned that the ground was alive, that there was an infinite world of creeping and flying things living their own rich life without paying the least regard to us. I caught a fraction of a fraction of that world and pinned it down in my boxes... they're sitting there, those insects. As if biding their time."

And so, to

(Image: npr.org)

Vermeer

by Tomas Tranströmer (translated from the Swedish by Robin Fulton, from The Great Enigma)

No protected world... Just behind the wall the noise begins,

the inn

with laughter and bickering, rows of teeth, tears, the din of bells

and the insane brother-in-law, the death-bringer we all must tremble for.

The big explosion and the tramp of rescue arriving late,

the boats preening themselves on the straits, the money creeping down in the wrong man's pocket